An award-winning physics student who murdered a teenage girl he had lured to his home with promises of a modelling job has been arrested a year after he committed the brutal killing in Mexico City.

Javier Mendez Ovalle, described as a ‘genius’ who had represented Mexico in several international physics competitions, has admitted to strangling and dismembering 19-year-old Sandra Camacho in June 2013.

Mexican police were finally able to track down the 23-year-old this month after he called his parents and told them the name of the cafe where he was working, local media reports.

Mendez Ovalle had met Miss Camacho on Facebook and has told police he killed her after she discovered he had made up the promised modelling work to get a date with her.

Mendez Ovalle has been described as an introverted and extremely gifted physics student and the year before the murder, he won bronze for Mexico in International Physics Olympiads.

Despite his academic success, Mendez Ovalle had been complaining to friends that although he understood science he could not understand women and was depressed that he could not get a girlfriend.

In June last year, he began speaking to Miss Camacho and the pair agreed to meet in Mexico City after he made false promises to help her find a job as a model.

The pair were caught on CCTV on June 27 as they met at a subway station in the city.

‘He met the victim on a social network where he pretended he could help her find a job,’ Mexico City's attorney general Attorney General Rodolfo Rios Garza said.

‘He says that when she realised there was no job they started to argue and then he pushed her and injured her head.

‘Moments later the girl started to scream and then he strangled her until she was dead.

‘He says that he then panicked and he dismembered her body. He cut her legs off and then her head and put all the pieces into garbage bags and threw them out with the rubbish,’ he added.

The 19-year-old victim's dismembered body was found scattered in plastic bags near Mendez Ovalle’s flat on June 30 last year, and police were soon on his trail after reading through the young girl's Facebook messages.

Mendez Ovalle managed to stay hidden for more than a year, living under a fake name in nearby San Juan del Rio and working as a waiter.

A prosecutor's office spokesperson said: ‘He never came back to his apartment or his old life and there was a worldwide search for him until we found him here right on our doorstep.’